Wednesday: Driving To Clearwater

Wednesday morning, we packed up our things, packed into the rental car, and headed up to Mom's apartment. It was her two-day weekend and she was glad to be able to see us without having Paul around to confuse things.

We all swam in the apartment complex's pool. I'd forgotten that she lives next to a massive golf course. I'd also forgotten that she had strong opinions about how "blacks" had moved into the neighborhood, but then some equilibrium had been acheived and the local ethnography wasn't changing much anymore.

We had lunch together at a local deli. I'm really happy that I was able to cook for her the other day, and I'm really getting sick of dining out.

We hit the road, crossing the Everglades through Alligator Alley, stopping once at the Miccosukee Reservation gas station. Despite being the only gas for a hundred miles in either direction, the gas prices were not unreasonable. The bathrooms, however, were positively Lovecraftian.

We stopped at a place called "Ralph's Reef" for dinner, where I had more fish. I'm drinking way too much soda pop this trip; gonna have to go back to a serious diet when I get home, I suspect. Ralph's is the kind of place that has TV on all the time, and FOX news on all the time. "Woman missing in Aruba!" was the headline of the moment, and I turned to Omaha and said, "Watch, she's young, white, and pretty." And so she was; Hell, she was even blonde.

Then we turned North and headed up the coast to Clearwater, Omaha's old home town. Every billboard between Naples and Tampa was for a personal injury attorney or lawfirm. Every last damned one of them. It was eye-opening.

We reached Omaha's father's house, and he led us to his brother's condominium on the beach, which we had borrowed for a few days. It was a beautiful space, and we even got decent wi-fi. But after seven hours on the road, we all just went to bed.

Thursday: Burn, Baby, Burn.

We took the girls to the beach the next day, where Omaha and I got fairly straightforward sunburns, ate ice-cream, and basically spent much of the day goofing off. People-watching at the beach is sometimes fun, although you know it when you see a woman going past with the best breasts money could buy.

I'd forgotten just how pervy Florida can be. Along with all the attorneys, there are drive-through liquor stores, zillions of "gentlemen's clubs," and so many "adult bookstores" you'd think the Internet had never happened.

Omaha and I have observed that most people are consumers of the Internet. They think it "just happened" and they're pleased to pay for it and have it work. We're spoiled in Seattle the way Detroiters are spoiled about motorcars; we know it won't keep working without a few Morlocks to keep it going.

We drove around to some of Omaha's haunts this time: her old high-school, a favored park, and so on.

Dinner was at a steak house with Omaha's dad and his wife. They're both lovely people, much more at home in their skins than my mother is in hers.

We got back to the apartment and I slathered Omaha's back with aloe & lidocane ointment, because she was reddening up terribly. We put the giggling girls to bed and slept ourselves.

Friday: Busch Gardens, Tampa

Gator

We decided to burn some cash and go to Busch Gardens, a major theme park in the Tampa Bay area. The girls were entirely up for that. Busch started out as a garden, quite literally, a recreational post-Victorian stroll-through, a gift from the Anheiser-Busch beer dynasty to the community that housed it. Through the years it has morphed into a quasi-zoo, quasi-rides park, with relationships with the Children's Television Workshop and Seaworld on the side. The major parks are all named after places in Africa, with labels that screamed "we know it's considered insensitive these days, but we have to label it something and if we changed it nobody would recognize the place."

They have a meal deal that is sorta worth it, if you're not eating with kids. Adult meals would recoup the buyer's price, kids meals not so much.

Hot Lioness

There's a small water park for little kids only, associated with Sesame Street. One section is called "Oscar's Swamp Stomp," and it has a sign saying "Do not swallow the water! The water is recirculated." Translation: "If you get this water in your mouth, know that it contains the pee of ten thousand toddlers."

The cast members were friendly, but after viewing a filked version of "I Kissed A Girls" into "I Dropped Some Trash!" during which employees danced and sang with mops and brooms and so forth about the joys of not littering, I had to say, "Four years of private Dance and Drama school training, and this is what you do for a living?"

We rode in several roller coasters, ate at the steak house, and rode more rollercoasters, including one that dangled riders over a precipice before dropping them down a vertical shaft. Only Storm and I were willing to go on that one. (Later, only Storm and Omaha got to ride the Cheetah.) We saw kangaroos and komodo dragons, and alligators and cheetahs and all the rest. It's much more a "look at the big pretty animals" park than a working zoo; there is no research there.

My body can no longer consume 2 liters of Pepsi without consequence.

Toward the evening we had a quick dinner at yet another fast food place, then Omaha convinced me to ride on the last surviving roller-coaster from her youth, thirty years ago. It was actually still fun. We stopped at the "Busch Gardens History" hallway so she could reminisce and I could mock the ancient costumes of Germany on Ice (Lederhosen and ice skates for the win!) and other old stuff they had had there.

We drove home late, and went back to bed.

(no subject)

WTF

The next day, we sent the kids off with the grandparents, who had determined to take them to Universal Studios. Whoa, this is looking more and more like a vacation every day. That left Omaha and I at loose ends.

We drove around to more of her haunts, which was actually kinda fun. She was a volunteer at the aquarium, mostly helping with fundraising but had fond memories of the facilities itself. The aquarium is doing a big round with a new movie about one of its own dolphins, a tailless soul named Winter about whom they're making a movie (think Day of the Dolphin meets Benji). The movie apparently features fitting the dolphin with an artificial tail, so it's kinda cool, and it stars Kris Kristofferson and Morgan Freeman as avunculars, and the soundtrack is cheesy as heck.

We stopped at a mall because we were bored. Westfield Mall Operators makes every mall seem the same: the inside of the Clearwater Mall was exactly the same colors and architecture as Southcenter mall. The most surreal thing we saw there was "The Middle Earth Olive Oil Company," which just seemed like a marketing disaster. There was also a hair color place that used black and white posters to emphasize their use of color.

The Church of Scientology.

We tried to find a restaurant, so we stopped in downtown. Downtown Clearwater is headquarters to the Church of Scientology, and it is completely overrun with men and women, always walking in pairs, all wearing blazing white dress shirts and black slacks. The shirts all have logos on them that indicate their ranks within the organization. I saw over 50 people walk by in the half hour we were there, and never did I see anyone walking with someone from a different ranking.

If you want to see genuine, pod-people crazy, that's it in spades. We couldn't find a restaurant there, so we went back to the beach.

After a beachside lunch, we swam for hours. It's hard not to love the beach, especially when you've grown up in the water. I was comfortable with my eyes open underwater, a fact which had annoyed my girls days before.

Dinner with Omaha was at a place called The Crab Shack, and it featured mostly seafood. The best plate, although I didn't get it, was the frog legs & alligator bites. Omaha got the blue crab special, a local delicacy with a decidely unusual flavor. The last time I was in a ramshackle bar and Heart's Crazy For You was playing on the jukebox, it was just before the aliens arrived. The cole slaw was really good, the potato salad excellent, salted and with a hint of bacon.

Drive to Jacksonville.

The next day we had lunch with the grandparents and then drove out, headed for Jacksonville. Other than a big chunk of the freeway basically not existing but for gaily colored construction equipment (who dyes their backhoes bright pink?), there wasn't much to see. We were driving through the heart of Florida. It was very gothic, lots of farmland and horses and billboards. There were fewer attorneys along this stretch, but Omaha noticed a very disturbing pattern after a while: one sign for "Join the Marines," two signs for sleazy bookstores, and then one for a retirement home.

As far as I can tell, in this farm country, if you don't join the Marines, your alternative is to stay and there ain't many women, so they've got a big supply of wank. If you live long enough, you might get to play golf if your artifical hip will let you.

There are no helmet laws in Florida, and there are dozens of old guys (i.e. my age) riding around with long hair and wrap-around goggles and no helmets. It's kinda weird looking. Also saw two twenty-something couples go buy on two bikes, and only one girl was wearing a helmet. Nobody wears road armor; hard to blame them when the afternoons are 98F (37C).

Passed a sign for "Jack's Junk Food Joint." Yeaaaahhh... I'd want to eat there.

They must be desperate for sysadmins here. I passed a huge billboard with a cartoon alligator. "DO YOU KNOW LINUX? WE'RE HIRING!" It was for HostGator. It felt surreal. Well, if I ever move back, at least I know I'll have a job.

We got into Jacksonville late, found the hotel. It's a Radisson, and we are most displeased. First, the WIFI sucked. We complained. It got better. I am under the impression they said, "Oh, family of four. They don't need WIFI. If they do, the second-floor nodes, where all the business people are, will be enough." It wasn't. Apparently, "Family of four with nine WIFI-enabled devices" (2 laptops, 3 Nooks, 1 iPod, 1 iPhone, 1 iPad, and a Palm T|X) is still pretty weird around here.

I stayed up late and finished, for the first time, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

My Sleep Number Is (e)(pi)(i)

But what is most distressing at the Radisson Hotes are the beds. They're Sleep Number beds, and they suck. Radisson has a deal with them so that Sleep Number can pimp their beds at the hotels, and the hotel gets their bedding at a discount.

The beds work by having a segmented air bladder between the relatively thin mattress and the box spring. The bladder helps redistribute weight and control how much give the mattress has. The flexible segmentation zones of the bladder give it a water-bed like feel at "low" settings, and a solid mattress-like feel at "high" settings.

I don't know if it's because they're hotel beds and have been abused, but these are hard to get working right. They seem to stop and start at random. They deflate a little every day.

But worse, they're just damned uncomfortable. At the low setting, it's like sleeping on a lumpy jello-filled waterbed, and given our difficulties with getting the compressor working, we were forced to sleep like that. Later, we had more luck, and got it up to a solid feel, but it's still annoying. Worse, the mattress and the bladder are combined in a single unit, so the frame of the top piece is a solid metal bar you bump up against in the night.

Most of all, I just don't see the point. Sorry, Garrison Keillor. Once you know what firmness of mattress you like, just go buy one of those. If you have a set preference, you're going to set it and forget it. Why spend double of an ordinary bed, or more, for the one-time experience of going through days of back pain until you find the solidity you like?

Monday in Jacksonville

Caught up with Omaha's mother and went to breakfast. The girls have now eaten at that all-American greasy spoon, a Waffle House. The waffles were fluffy but uninteresting, the eggs were eggs, the coffee was so-so. I haven't had a decent cup of coffee in Florida that I haven't made myself.

I taught Kouryou-chan what a syllogism is.

Omaha's mother drives like a Floridian. "Rude, Fast, and proud of it."

We spent the day at the beach again. Kouryou-chan took a few steps into the water and then screamed. "My foot, my foot!" She started crying as I hauled her out onto the beach and took a look. She'd been hit by a jellyfish. Fortunately we were only a block from a major first-aid station, and we hauled her there.

A very (very!) hunky life-guard in a tight-fitting teenytiny red speedo (oh, my, I do believe I almost got the vapors) directed us to another, less hunky but oh-my-lords blonde cutie-with-scruff EMT who looked over Kouryou-chan's foot and pronounced she would live. He sprayed her with a product called JellySquish (basically, concentrated lidocane), which you can no longer buy "but any lidocane burn stuff is good enough." He told us that jellyfish venom breaks down very rapidly in the presence of heat and acid, so pouring the warmest water you can stand, and hot vinegar presses, will make the pain go away fastest.

Had dinner at a restaurant called the Lime & Leaf. Sorta snooty Thai place, lots of salt in their food, but definitely delicious Thai by any standard. I am under the impression that my family's tastes are distinctly "exotic" to Omaha's mother, what with Thai and Indian and so forth as staples.

We were pleased to leave the kids with Omaha's mother for the night. She wanted to get to know them better, and that gave Omaha and I an evening to sleep quietly.

Big Box Bookstores of The Southeast!

I had some time to kill while Omaha spent the morning with her mother. I had the girls and had promised Kouryou-chan could get her hair into a pixie cut, so that's what we did. I also picked her up some bubble gum.

The place we went was a Borders wannabe called "Millions of Books." The middle floor was arranged in a phalanx of shelves from nonfiction through fiction, with SF facing "teens," and romance all the way in the back. Around the edges were seven zones, squared off topic areas with shelves for partitions: "Science," "Bibles and Christian Studies," "Cooking," "Computers," "Politics," and "Current Nonfiction." The science section had been squeezed into a small island in the middle of its own section; the Bible and Christian Studies section had colonized its perimeter shelves. The Computer section had likewise been relegated to the island, and it's perimeter was now moldy with business books. The politics section was full, but all of the facing books were right-wing in their leanings.

That was certainly the biggest Bibles section I've ever seen outside of a Christian-specific bookstore.

In the self-help section, there was an entire bookshelf, six shelves full, labeled "human sexuality." Normally, I'd expect that section to be just one or two shelves of how-to manuals. But no, there were no how-to manuals. This was entirely erotica.

It had a coffee shop, but also a generic I'd never heard of. Still, the guy behind the counter was a friendly, fen-type who gave me the best coffee I've had yet this trip.